At 11:02 a.m. on Thursday, July 13, 1899, John and Louise Davis left New York’s Herald Square in their two-cylinder National Duryea “touring cart,” headed, they told reporters, “to ‘Frisco or bust!” Bust it was. A one-armed bicyclist who left New York 10 days after the couple passed them in Syracuse. By the time the Davises arrived in Cleveland, their cart had been repaired at least 20 times. When they reached Chicago in October, they abandoned their transcontinental journey. An automobile, Louise Davis concluded, “is a treacherous animal for a long trip.” Automobile touring demanded “plenty of pluck, patience, and profanity,” her husband said, “and I think that I am becoming proficient.”

Four years later, Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson tamed the treacherous animal. After sending his wife ahead on a train, he embarked from San Francisco for New York on May 23, 1903, with a mechanic named Sewall K. Crocker in a one-cylinder Winton touring car. Axles broke. Tires blew. Getting up steep grades or through deep mud required a block and tackle or a team of horses. Gasoline often proved hard to come by. So, sometimes, did food. But they persevered. At 4:30 a.m. on July 26, 63 days after setting out, Jackson and Crocker, along with a stray dog that had joined them in Idaho, pulled up before the Holland House on Fifth Avenue. They were the first to cross the continent in an automobile.
 

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